Justin Vaïsse is a French historian and intellectual. He is the director of the Centre for Analysis, Planning and Strategy, a think tank of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. An expert in U.S. political history and foreign policy, Vaïsse has taught at the Paris Institut d’Etudes Politiques (IEP), at the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) and at Johns Hopkins University. He is a former Director of Research at the Brookings Institution. He is the author of Barack Obama et sa politique étrangère, L’Empire du milieu and Une Histoire du néo-conservatisme aux Etats-Unis, published by Odile Jacob.

How did a young Polish immigrant become the strategist of the most powerful nation in the world? What does his itinerary tells us about the developments in U.S. geopolitics?
Zbigniew Brzezinski arrived in America in 1938, at the age of ten. After studying at McGill University, in Montreal, he went on to Harvard in 1950, and later became a respected professor of international relations. Like Henry Kissinger, he imposed himself on the WASP establishment as one of the most influential foreign policy advisors, as well as one of the most insightful Sovietologists of his time.
His meteoric career led him to the White House, as President Carter’s National Security Advisor. During the next forty years, he was regularly consulted by various administrations and his recommendations have been followed at numerous times and on a variety of issues, from the Cold War to the collapse of the Berlin Wall, from the war in Iraq to the rise of China.

• Besides depicting the success story of a tenacious, highly talented immigrant, this biography gives us an inside view of the relations between the U.S. and the rest of the world.
• As he takes us behind the scenes, the author reveals some fascinating events concerning the Cold War, the role of Pope John Paul II in the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the place of the United States in a multipolar world, etc.